What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

for Louis Riel:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A graphic novel on a key episode
in Canadian history,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A graphic novel of a different kind,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

When I started sending you books, I said they would be books “known to expand stillness”. A book is a marvellous tool—in fact, a unique tool—to increase one’s depth of reflection, to help one think and feel. It takes a long time and great effort to write a good book, whether of fiction or non-fiction. It’s not only the preliminary research; there’s also the weeks and months of thinking. When asked how long it took them to write a book, I’ve heard writers say, “My whole life.” I know what they mean by that. Their entire being went into the writing of that book, and the few years it actually took to get it down on the page were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It’s not surprising that such a lengthy process, akin to the maturing of a good wine, should yield a rich product worthy of careful consideration.

But the stillness that books can induce does not mean they are peaceable. Stillness is not the same thing as tranquility. You might have noticed that a few weeks ago with Julius Caesar. There’s hardly any peace and tranquility in that play, yet it is thought-provoking nonetheless, isn’t it?

That stillness out of turmoil continues with the two books I am sending you this week. I’m sure you are familiar with the tragic saga of Louis Riel. The English hated him, the French loved him. Of course, I don’t mean the English and French of Europe when I say that. I mean the people from that nation that materialized north of the United States. The English and Irish and Scottish of Ontario were newly calling themselves Canadians, while the French-speaking Métis of the Red River Settlement were not. In one man, the tensions and resentments of a new nation were symbolized. It was a complicated mess whose effects are felt to this day. Would the Parti Québécois have been elected in 1976 had Louis Riel and Red River Métis been treated more fairly by Ottawa? Or would that have led Ontarians to elect an “Ontario Party” advocating union withthe United States? What is clear—and you must surely know this from your own personal experience in politics—is that once prejudice and bad faith are entrenched among a people, it’s very hard to get them to get along.

Louis Riel, by the Canadian graphic artist Chester Brown, is a serious work that tells a serious story in a thoughtful and evocative manner. The drawings are compelling and the storytelling is both gripping and subtle. Louis Riel comes across as he likely was: a strange and charismatic man, religiously crazy at times but also genuinely concerned about the fate of his Métis people.

The description “strange and charismatic” could also be applied to the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). If Riel was religiously crazy, then Mishima was aesthetically crazy. You might have heard about how Mishima died. He’s as well known for his death as he is for his writings. The life of an author should not normally be conflated with his work, but a healthy writer who, at the age of forty-five and at the height of his fame, commits suicide by ritual disembowelment and beheading—what is popularly called harakiri—after taking over a military base and exhorting the army of his country to overthrow the government, cannot but attract attention for reasons other than his books. In this case, life and work are intimately linked. Mishima’s end had less to do with politics and restoring Japan to a supposed former glory than withpersonal notions he had about deathand beauty. He was obsessed by death and beauty. The characters in his novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea—Fusako, the mother; Noboru, her son; and Ryuji, the sailor—demonstrate this. They are exquisitely realized. One gets a sense of them not only in their physical being but in their inner makeup too. All are, in their different ways, beautiful. And yet their story is riven by violence and death. I won’t say anything more.  

I’ll confess that when I first read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea in my early twenties, I hated it because I loved it. It and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger  are the only masterpieces I’ve read with the breathless feeling that I possibly could have written them myself. Those two stories were in me, I felt, but a Japanese writer and Norwegian writer got to them before I could.

I should explain why I am sending you two books this week. I’m off on a holiday and don’t want to worry about books being lost in the mail. So these are your April books, Louis Riel for April 13th and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for April 27th.

How curious and unrelated they seem. I doubt Mishima had ever heard of Louis Riel, and there’s nothing in Louis Riel to make me think that Chester Brown is an admirer of Mishima. But I’ve always liked that about books, how they can be so different from each other and yet rest together without strife on a bookshelf. The hope of literature, the hope of stillness, is that the peace with which the most varied books can lie side by side will transform their readers, so that they too will be able to live side by side with people very different from themselves.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback and one inscribed paperback

Reply:

April 29, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence, with which you enclosed a copy of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima and a copy of Louis Riel, A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown.

The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these books. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours truly,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer